How to install the MATE and Cinnamon desktops on Fedora 18

GNOME is the default, but we'll show you how to switch to your favorite UI.

Fedora 18 was released today, and among the promised new features are alternatives to the GNOME desktop in the form of MATE and Cinnamon. Fedora users who dislike the latest versions of GNOME may be disappointed to learn that it's still the only desktop environment that is installed by default—MATE and Cinnamon have to be installed separately.

These alternative desktop environments could already be installed through the command line on Fedora 17. Promising support for both MATE and Cinnamon in official release notes and press announcements might have led some to hope that the interfaces would be included right up front. But with the full install DVDs going up to 4.4GB and MATE alone adding another 104MB, Fedora maintainers decided not to bulk up that download any further.

Thus, you still have to do some extra work to get an alternative to GNOME. Here's how to do it.

The network install is the thing

If you want MATE or Cinnamon right off the bat, you need to do a network installation. This allows you to choose any desktop environment before installing the operating system. When it comes to MATE/Cinnamon support, this is the main difference between Fedora 18 and 17. In 17, you could install either desktop through the command line after installing the whole operating system. Now you can do it either through the command line or during a network installation.

The easiest way is to download the lightweight network install media. It's available at this page with the 64-bit version weighing in at 294MB.

Once you arrive at the "Installation Summary" screen, you'll see options including Installation Source and Software Selection. By default, GNOME is what gets installed. Click "Software Selection" in order to bring up a list of options including the MATE and Cinnamon desktops:

From there you proceed as normal. Whether you do a network installation or traditional install, you can add additional desktop environments after you've got Fedora up and running. One way is through the graphical user interface's software installer. Just search the desktop for "Software," and then go into the Software app and search for MATE or Cinnamon.

Alternatively, either desktop can be installed through the terminal with the command sudo yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" or sudo yum groupinstall "Cinnamon Desktop".

If you end up with multiple desktop interfaces, you'll get to choose which one you want when you log in to your session, as seen here:

GNOME has turned some users off since it was radically redesigned in version 3.0, ditching the traditional desktop metaphor for a new interface relying heavily on search and an overlay that provides access to applications. The MATE and Cinnamon desktops, often used with the popular Linux Mint operating system, attempt to continue development of interfaces that appeal to fans of GNOME 2.

MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 code base, whereas Cinnamon uses GNOME 3 as its base. MATE recreates the Applications/Places/System menus on the top left of the screen like in GNOME 2, as we noted in our earlier coverage:

Although MATE and Cinnamon still don't have the prominent status in Fedora that GNOME does, there are members of the Fedora open source community devoted to maintaining MATE and Cinnamon packages for the OS.

It's not clear if either MATE or Cinnamon will be included by default in future versions of Fedora, but they could get their own "spins": special versions of the OS created for alternative interfaces. Today those spins include the desktop environments KDE, LXDE, and Xfce. MATE for Fedora maintainer Dan Mashal told Ars that he is working on both a live CD and a new spin for MATE to be ready for Fedora 19.

More good stuff in Fedora 18

With Fedora 18's release, GNOME was updated to version 3.6 with "enhancements to the message tray and notifications, revisions to the Activities Overview and accessibility support," the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project's announcement said. GNOME 3.6 also brings support for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service, according to the Fedora 18 release notes.

The KDE Plasma Workspaces interface was updated to version 4.9 with stability and performance improvements, and Fedora's Anaconda installer was "completely rewritten" to be simpler and easier to understand for new users without sacrificing advanced options for experienced users.

The Fedora Project also called out enhancements for developers in version 18, including "fresh versions of Python, Rails, D and Perl," and the Clojure tooling packages and libraries. The improvements for system administrators are numerous, including Samba 4 for open source implementation of Active Directory protocols, and the inclusion of Eucalyptus, software for creating Amazon-style cloud networks.

The Fedora Project describes the system admin improvements as follows:

The recently released Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols, further enhancing its long-standing use for file and print sharing in heterogeneous server environments. Fedora 18 also includes multiple enhancements to storage management with new tools and libraries for storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) management, and the addition of System Storage Manager, a unified command-line interface for managing multiple storage technologies. oVirt Engine, the management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, brings in new features with its 3.1 release, and Eucalyptus, a platform for on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, makes its debut in Fedora 18 with its 3.2 release. Finally, Fedora continues to offer fresh releases of OpenStack, bringing in the Folsom release; Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is newly available in Fedora, enabling via API the orchestration of cloud applications using file- or web-based templates.

Fedora 18 is a very nice distro. I get that many people don't like gnome 3, and these are completely valid alternatives. To each their own. Personally, gnome 3 treats me very well, and it's nice to see open source eye-candy that, for me, is as functional and sometimes more functional than gnome 2 was.

Quick FYI for potential Fedora upgraders, preupgrade is out, fedup is in. fedup is CLI only atm, but offers probably the easiest way to upgrade from 17 to 18; it's not supported on any version before 17.

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

Not to be a jerk, but what, pray tell, is wrong with the fonts? I have never understood people who snub an entire distro over something like the font. Its easily readable, and probably changeable. So what's the issue?

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

You can blame patents for that.

Microsoft in particular owns some very nice patents that, as far as I know, have never been licensed out to anybody except maybe Apple (and the two have very different ideas about how vector should be rendered on an LCD screen).

TechGeek wrote:

Not to be a jerk, but what, pray tell, is wrong with the fonts? I have never understood people who snub an entire distro over something like the font. Its easily readable, and probably changeable. So what's the issue?

It takes months of effort to make a good font, and only a bare handful are available for use in open source software. Almost all fonts on open source distros aren't very good at all. Certainly not as good as, say, Calibri or Avenir (my current two favourites).

The few good fonts they have are spoiled by bad subpixel rendering or none at all. Some necessary reading:

The few good fonts they have are spoiled by bad subpixel rendering or none at all.

I've yet to see any subpixel rendering that didn't look like a dire, multicolored mess. But adjusting how X11 renders fonts is simple matter of adjusting one's ~/.fonts.conf file to taste, such as in this useful guide which fixed all the annoyances I'd had with fonts under Linux.

I used to believe that Linux was many years ahead of other OSes (I still believe it is ahead, only not to that extent), but after a long time using MATE (and liking it) I realized that it is KDE that is many years ahead. You see, although I like MATE, I miss a one-click-away-attached-terminal, I miss a copy/move to anywhere-in-the-system-function, I miss a good CD-burner, I miss a torrent downloader with a shut-down-when-finished-button, I suffer with a pdf reader with ridiculous printing options and lacking some others, I suffer with an image viewer which can't be set to display pictures in real size, I suffer with a sticky notes widget which can't even Ctrl+Z and doesn't have transparency, I miss a Alt+F2+Up which gets the last command I used and many other things I only remember while I'm suffering. Sometimes I think I'm on Windows.

If you're ticked off about the design paradigm shift that GNOME 3 made, perhaps it's time to consider more light-weight alternatives. If you take the time to look down at GNOME's internals (either 2 or 3), you might notice that both are really rather bulky and maybe even bloated. Now that systemd is going to be made a hard dependency of GNOME 3, the bloating will only continue. There is a web of dependencies that come with either desktop environment that aren't really worth it to some people.

If you find that you want a more light-weight, clean desktop, consider putting the pieces together yourself; this approach gives you the most choice, the most control, and the least bloat. I would recommend Openbox (window manager) + tint2 (panels) + nitrogen (backgrounds) + SLIM (login manager). It takes a bit more effort, but don't be scared off. It's easier than most people think, and you can generally install these components side-by-side with your desktop and switch back and forth between using them and the big DE if you have configured your login manager correctly.

In addition to giving you more control, these light-weight configurations might just speed up your system too!

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

You can blame patents for that.

Microsoft in particular owns some very nice patents that, as far as I know, have never been licensed out to anybody except maybe Apple (and the two have very different ideas about how vector should be rendered on an LCD screen).

A solution would be to get a distro from an organization that isn't in the US. Ubuntu and Linux Mint have sub-pixel rendering enabled by default. Their font rendering is visually similar to that of OS X.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a check box in Fedora to enable it. The last time I used Solaris, it had FreeType compiled with sub-pixel rendering, but switched off by default. When I went to switch it on, I got a warning that I should only enable it if I was in a jurisdiction where no patents applied.

You get the same issue with audio and video codecs. Although, it seems to come down to being American and big enough to be worthwhile suing. PC-BSD is provided by iXsystems, Inc., but has sub-pixel rendering enabled by default and a full version of mplayer. (If GNU/Linux is a minority interest, BSD is an order of magnitude more so.)

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

I'm not sure how Jon took the first two screenshots, but the extreme blurring there isn't normal, in my experience (believe me, I've only run the F18 installer a few thousand times or so). You might want to try the live image yourself instead of relying on screenshots to evaluate the typography. I'm not going to promise you'll love it - I've seen all kinds of reactions to all kinds of typography, it seems a highly subjective area - but screenshots aren't always an accurate representation.

To the people complaining about fonts(and I agree so no this is not meant to be snarky), check out Infinality. http://www.infinality.net/It has a Fedora repo so installing it is very easy, F18 RPM's have been out for a while.

Not to be a jerk, but what, pray tell, is wrong with the fonts? I have never understood people who snub an entire distro over something like the font. Its easily readable, and probably changeable. So what's the issue?

Probably changeable? Have you ever tried to configure (almost anything on) a vanilla Gnome 3? It's as bad as Win8. You need to do some research and figure out how to install the correct panels. It's stupid on the face of it.

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

Not to be a jerk, but what, pray tell, is wrong with the fonts? I have never understood people who snub an entire distro over something like the font. Its easily readable, and probably changeable. So what's the issue?

That it doesn't look nice! The appearance is very important, not just that you can read the text..To pick one specific example "System Tools" in the "Cinnamon" screenshot show irregular spacing between letters.

Truetype hinting is patented by Microsoft and hence usually not packaged in most distros. It is available if you install it from an add-on repository outside the U.S. In the case of Fedora, install the package freetype-freeworld from rpmforge. This fixes most of the ugly font complaints ... especially if you also install in a few open source font families like Deja Vu, BitStream Vera, Liberation and Droid. I especially like Droid Sans for printed documents.

Linux for the desktop needs some serious love in the typography department. These screenshots do not sell me on a reason to switch or even spend time trying it out.

Agreed, in fact Ubuntu is funding a massive new font (called, imaginatively, "Ubuntu") that supports all their major languages in regular, bold, and italic as well as monospace types. I like it enough that I replace the Android font with it on my phone. http://font.ubuntu.com/

What are people's opinions of the liberation fonts from Red Hat? Are they no better?

renoX: Wow, the only place I can maybe see it is between the "t" and the "e" in system. And I think that may just be because of the shape of the letters. And I had to look really close to even see that.

What are people's opinions of the liberation fonts from Red Hat? Are they no better?

renoX: Wow, the only place I can maybe see it is between the "t" and the "e" in system. And I think that may just be because of the shape of the letters. And I had to look really close to even see that.

Yes in system the spacing between 's', 't' and 'e' looks weird and also in 'Tools' there is not enough space between the 'T' and the 'o'.That's just one example.. At first I didn't look at the screenshot and thought that the complainer was only a fanboy, yet I was wrong: when I looked at the screenshot and I thought that indeed the fonts aren't very good.

What are people's opinions of the liberation fonts from Red Hat? Are they no better?

renoX: Wow, the only place I can maybe see it is between the "t" and the "e" in system. And I think that may just be because of the shape of the letters. And I had to look really close to even see that.

Liberation was designed with specific requirements. They use the same metrics (line height, spacing, hinting) as Microsoft's Web Core fonts (Times New Roman, Ariel, and Courier New). This should result in fewer overflowing layouts on web sites if you use that as your default web browser fonts. Open Sans and Open Serif are a much wider font and can result in some odd reflow issues since the content is larger than the developer expected.